HOW EVIL WORKS

Why Team Obama thrives on creating crises

Exclusive: David Kupelian shows how unbridled chaos is mother's milk for leftists

David Kupelian is an award-winning journalist, managing editor of WND and editor of Whistleblower magazine. A widely read online columnist, he is also the best-selling author of "The Marketing of Evil" and "How Evil Works.".

The Obama administration’s primary mode of governance is literally to create crises where none actually exist. As I have explained
previously, “Big
Lies” transform people and entire societies, and the most powerful form of “Big Lie,” at least when it
comes to government, is the manufactured crisis.

Before we turn our 10,000-watt spotlight on the outrageous turmoil Obama and company have promoted in America, let’s take a few moments to understand what a manufactured crisis really amounts to.

As I explain in my new book “How Evil Works,” anyone even superficially familiar with the history of the political left has heard references to the strategy of creating crises as a means of transforming society. You’ve probably heard of the “Hegelian dialectic,” a key Marxist technique whereby an idea (“We need more gun-control laws!”) generates its opposite (“No, we don’t need more gun laws, we just need tougher sentencing of criminals!”) which leads to a reconciliation of opposites, or synthesis (“OK, we’ll compromise by passing new gun-control laws, but watering them down somewhat”).

Likewise, maybe you’ve heard of the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” – inspired by leftwing radical organizer Saul Alinsky, whose methods Barack Obama adopted – which openly advocates the creation of crises to destroy capitalist society. This is how socialist progress is achieved “peacefully” – through conflict or crisis – and always in the direction of greater socialism.

The problem is, this “crisis-creation” talk just sounds so crazy, so foreign to us, that it’s hard to believe our fellow human beings, no matter how confused or deluded, could actually engage in such a practice. But it’s not only true, it’s actually a common part of everyday life.

Consider this nonpolitical example and note how it illustrates the power of a crisis to mold people to the deceiver’s will: in one child-abduction case, a little girl was approached after school by a man she didn’t know. He claimed her house was burning down, that her parents were busy putting out the fire, and that he was a friend of the parents who had asked him to pick up their daughter and take her to them. The crisis – and the emotional upset the girl experienced over the thought of her house being on fire and her parents in danger – drowned out her normal caution about getting into a car with a stranger. You guessed it: the stranger was a predator who had concocted the lie for the sole purpose of upsetting and thereby tricking the girl into going with him so he could brutalize and murder her. (This “classic” child-predator technique was recounted in the film “Changeling” starring Angelina Jolie, a true story in which the serial child murderer enticed youngsters into his car using this exact “your-house-is-on-fire” ruse.)

Tragic as this scenario is, it makes an important point: a crisis throws us off our guard, upsets us and inclines us to make decisions and accept “solutions” we normally would reject.

Politically, the strategy is to create a crisis, or exploit a real one, by throwing people into a mode where they can be redirected toward a predetermined “solution” – whether it’s imposing “carbon penalties” on businesses in response to fears of global warming or draconian gun-control laws in response to a rash of school shootings. We’re talking about solutions that people would normally reject, but now in a crisis accept, and as a result establish a new baseline of what is normal – which becomes the starting point for pushing the nation still further leftward in response to the next “crisis.”

Before we get into the current, specific crop of manufactured crises Team Obama is using to transform America, let’s survey a few old chestnuts, just to demonstrate how ubiquitous fake crises are. They’re everywhere around us:

Small towns and cities across America pull a certain stunt with depressing regularity around election time. They claim that if taxpayers don’t vote in favor of a new tax levy, they’ll be forced to eliminate or drastically cut back police and fire protection – two of the few services the people actually want from their government. I once lived in a town where the city council and city manager decided the way to force voters to approve their new tax levy would be to threaten to completely eliminate police protection within the city limits between midnight and 8 a.m. No joke. This was a crisis of their own creation and for their own obvious purposes. After all, the city council members and their budget committee could have reprioritized their budget to cut back on street sweeping, park maintenance, library hours, raises and benefits for city employees, or other things less crucial to the public safety and welfare, and gotten by on the existing tax base without leaving the citizens vulnerable to criminals every night. As I said, this is a common tactic in cities and towns up and down the turnpike.

The radical environmental movement’s primary modus operandi – from top to bottom – is the creation of crises where none exist. The “spotted owl” crisis in my home state of Oregon is a great example. Environmentalists claimed the northern spotted owl was dying out because of commercial logging of old-growth forests where the birds nested. So in 1991 a compliant judge halted logging in Oregon’s national forests, causing the loss of about 30,000 jobs, an 80 percent reduction in timber harvesting, a consequent decrease in the supply of lumber and sky-high prices. I remember – I was there. However, it wasn’t owls that environmentalists were in love with; they were in love with stopping loggers from harvesting any trees in Oregon’s old-growth forests. The owls just provided the needed “crisis.”

Oh, here’s the rest of the story. Long after Oregon’s timber-based economy was decimated by the court-ordered logging ban, the northern-spotted-owl population inexplicably continued to decline. Surprise! New research showed logging in old-growth forests wasn’t the problem at all. The real problem, it turned out, was competition from another larger and more aggressive species of owl that liked the same habitat and food as the spotted owl.

The truth is, ever since “socialism” lost its luster as the salvation of mankind (because it has never actually worked as promised anywhere), the environmental movement has become one of the most powerful, modern battering rams of the left for advancing the same socialist agenda.

Another legacy of phony environmental crises is our fear of nuclear power. In truth, nuclear energy is clean, homegrown and abundant, and its safety record is extremely good. Many other nations – including France, Russia and Japan – have long taken advantage of this amazing power source. But irrational fear, in response to an environmentalist-created “crisis” mentality, has gripped the American consciousness for decades and contributed greatly to our dangerous national dependence on foreign energy sources.

The “Fairness Doctrine” is a freedom-destroying solution to a crisis that doesn’t exist. With the exception of talk radio and certain online and cable TV news offerings, virtually the entire news-media establishment is overwhelmingly left-of-center. Yet some congressmen and senators claim there’s an unfair conservative bias in the media (talk radio) that demands “balance” by legally forcing radio stations to provide air time to “opposing views” – that is, to the left-leaning views that utterly dominate the rest of the information media.

Charges of rampant anti-Muslim bigotry and hate-crimes in the U.S., leveled by groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the ACLU, constitute a totally fake crisis. Actually, Americans have demonstrated extraordinary restraint and magnanimity toward Muslims since the September 11 terror attacks and the subsequent revelations of widespread Islamist antipathy toward America. In fact, according to the FBI’s own statistics, in the five years following 9/11, anti-Islamic hate crimes in the U.S. decreased by 68 percent!

We could go on and on – fake crises are everywhere. As I said, crisis is the central operating principle of the Obama presidency, which is always telling us, in effect, “your house is on fire, so come with me.” Everything is a crisis, an emergency, and has to be fixed right now – all for the purpose of vastly increasing government power and control over citizens’ wealth, behavior, their very lives.